Our band of Master-Apprentice teams from The Way of the Apprentice makes an appearance in The Dangerous Games, where they’ve been sent to work security at the Galactic Games (like our Olympics). This is a Jude Watson story, so of course a routine security assignment turns into something much more involved when it comes to light that there’s corruption among the games thanks to the underground betting taking place on the games. It’s also discovered that an illegal pod race will take place, and of course Anakin gets involved with that, running into old acquaintances from the Boonta Eve Classic.

Watson reprises Didi and Astri, the father-daughter owners of the diner from Jedi Apprentice, which was fun. They were the highlights of their stories in the earlier series, though Didi continues to be more of annoyance than anything else. Astri is now married to a go-getter involved with the games, which seemed like a stretch to me. I couldn’t see why she would even get involved with someone as smarmy as that, but hey, this is the franchise that expected us to buy the Padmé-Anakin relationship, so maybe there was a precedent involved. Either way, it wasn’t convincing.

Also, there were a few too many familiar faces in the story, making the Expanded Universe look a lot smaller. I get that the Galactic Games brings in people from all over, but for old friends and acquaintances to all find each other in this one event felt like a stretch. I’ve said before that the EU is lousy with coincidences, and that’s evident in The Dangerous Games. Obi-Wan might say that’s the Living Force guiding people together, but I can’t help but see it as fan service.

The story isn’t bad, and kept me engaged more than the preceding books in the series, but I still think the Jedi Apprentice series is better. In the end, the relationship between Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon is more interesting than the one between Obi-Wan and Anakin.

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"